We talk with some of the developers behind the last Flame and Frost arc and the changes coming to sPvP.

For spectator mode, the way that it will work is as you go to join a custom arena or one of the hot-join matches, which is everything at the PvP browser, you will instantly be put on the spectator team. You will have a screen that will say do you want to join the blue team, the red team, a random team or spectator. After you have done that you can watch any of the players in the game by clicking on them or you can click on a set of preset cameras. So I can follow a player and see exactly what they see – health, all the boons they have, all the conditions, the recharge on all of their skills and everything they have. You can see their entire template, which is what we call a whole build for a player, and see what that player is doing. You can pull the camera back and watch from one of our preset camera angles which will allow you to get a larger view of the tactics and strategies being deployed by the players in that arena.

During the beta phase you won't be able to keep your template private, but we know that is going to be an issue for high level players who don't want to show their stuff. So it is in the plans. Also templates will only be viewable while spectating, but expanding the templates is already on the docket and being looked at. The way templates worked at in GW1 is being looked at and if something similar is how they want to implement it in GW2.

For right now this will not be on the leaderboard games, so if you are playing a tournament match that impacts the leaderboard you won't be using spectator mode yet. As you can imagine since you are seeing this live it could cause a lot of cheating issues. So we are going to hold on to those and it won't be available for now, but we have a special plan for that which we will be talking about in some later updates.

We are pretty much going to be doing a beta test for our custom arenas and spectator mode. We have kind of held on to these to make sure they were ready to go, but we still want to test them in a live environment. Once we iron out all the small issues that come with being a live game instead of an internal piece of software that we are testing we will flip the switch and everyone will be able to use these. Everything looks good internally, but there is always that thing where you put something out on a live server something's going to happen. So we are going to see how long that is going to be. We are not certain how long the beta phase is going to last. So basically it will be when we feel that they are ready we will go ahead and release them to everybody.

In custom arenas you will be able to do everything that you expect from a first person shooter server. So the number of players, time limit, score limit, you can set up a bandwidth, favored members list, favorite guilds list, adjust the map rotation as you so choose, enable/disable spectator mode, those type of things. It is pretty much anything you can do in one of our maps you can toggle on and off and set the threshold for that specific feature.

For the first phase we wanted to keep the amount of things that you could tweak fairly small, to see what the player base does and then we will start expanding that. Also, as new game types start coming online, players can decide if they want to have those game types on their servers. We have also looked at maybe you want to have an activity type of custom arena where you can actually rent an activity for a time. Custom arenas are the framework to do all those types of things in PvP.

We had a leaderboard with qualifying points, so for beta we are going to have these set up so the top 50 players in America and Europe will be able to set up their own custom arenas as well as some other chosen media sites as well as other sites that will be selected if they want to try and host some tournaments and stuff like that. For the beta we are going to be doing that so it is a pretty small subset just to test it and see how it is going to feel.

When we are ready to roll everything out, we are going to sell a starter kit through the gem store which means that anyone who buys one can go and start their own custom arena. Another item is a Custom Arena Time Token and the way that this will work is that anyone who has one of these can either add time to their own custom arena (if they have one) or if they are playing in one of their favorite servers and they love the community, they love the players that are there, they love the structure of what they have done with their custom arena – they can add time to someone else's custom arena. Which means you can basically up-vote what people are doing with their custom arenas and you can support the people you really enjoy and what they are doing with their custom arena.

The pricing on the starter kit and time tokens are still not yet finalized. Tentatively the custom arena will last about a month when you first set it up. We are seeing if that length of time and the pricing is what feels good with the players, but a month is what we are going with for now.

The final chapter of the Flame and Frost story and Custom Arenas and Spectator Mode is not all that is coming to Guild Wars 2 on April 30^th. Check out the rundown of the other cool new things coming very soon to Guild Wars 2!

Matt "Mattsta" Adams